California's Green Policies Destroy Blue-Collar Jobs

Gavin Newsom complains of “faux outrage” over his comments to a largely black audience in Atlanta about his SAT scores, in which he implied a shared lack of ability. No state makes more of its “enlightened” stance on racial justice than California. But few states do worse.

Governor Newsom and his Sacramento claque have embraced reparations for the descendants of slaves. They are also working overtime to preserve affirmative action policies, despite the electorate’s widespread rejection.

But Newsom’s racial rhetoric is, as the leftist site Jacobin suggests, nothing more than “pure rhetorical posturing.”

For example, the reparations promise new free tuition and housing subsidies to anyone who can prove they are descendants of slaves — but there’s little to no money behind this feint.

California’s adoption of such “reparations,” recently also embraced in San Francisco, also seems a bit absurd, given that it was never a slave state.

California, like every state, is burdened by a racist past, but much of this was aimed at what were larger populations — first Native Americans, then old Californios (descendants of Mexican/Spanish settlers) and, most of all, Asians, who were banned from landownership and were subject to brutal pogroms, the worst occurring in Los Angeles.

But the greatest irony is that both Latinos and African Americans do worse in California than in “unenlightened places” like Texas and Florida.

The key difference in California has been the imposition of draconian environmental regulations, which have devastated industries like construction, manufacturing, and logistics.

It’s what attorney Jennifer Hernandez calls “the green Jim Crow.”

Latinos have been hardest hit because many are employed in the “carbon economy,” which relies on energy and has been decimated by regulatory pressures.

For example, Latinos constitute well over 50% of all California construction workers and the majority working in logistics, according to the American Community Survey.

But due to regulatory constraints, construction in California has been among the weakest in the nation, making it hard to build what the market wants — namely, affordable apartments and modestly-priced single family homes.

Read the rest of this piece at California Post.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com, follow him on Substack and Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Transportation workers via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.